•

  I found a seat one from the end of a row nearish to the back, and plonked down into it. I glimpsed the client in the distance, looking distraught and making a beeline for the double doors. As he passed my row, he paused and stared down at me for an instant. A glare fizzed between us. He looked up as the doors began to creak closed, and made a jerky goosestep towards them, but he was stilled by something. I followed his gaze along the row to where the wife of the double-breasted person was waving coolly. The client smiled sickeningly, showing his longish teeth, and waved back. He had one more glance at the doors, which were now shut, and plopped down beside me as if this were musical chairs.

  I turned to him. ‘Is that the CEO or something?’

  Like a ventriloquist, the client answered in the affirmative out the side of his mouth. He stared straight ahead. He didn’t know me. I got it. I turned back to the stage. You could tell by the hush that the show was about to begin.

  This was bloodsport. Being out in public with your illicit lover—even though it was all over—was man against Nature, i.e. woman against Nature, me. It was a lot of things. It was childhood fairground excitement. The odds of bumping into someone who knew us were about as low as the likelihood of a car flying off a fairground octopus, but the consequences were as dire. I pretended not to know the person sitting beside me. Whose guts I now hated. I had taken him in my mouth. I was in a rage.

  But on with the show.

  35

  It began with no preamble, straight into it like the bit of a film before the opening credits. A model strode out onto the catwalk looking, I’m sorry to say, very uninterested in life. No wonder. She was wearing a ridiculous green blouse with a cape collar so big it would get caught in machinery, a gathered skirt cinched in tight (you thought whalebones), and high high heels, stilts really. I wouldn’t be seen dead dressed like this. Is that the point? More dead-looking models followed, women like horses, lanky and loping. They walked the way models did in Europe, angular and wildly swaggering, but still with the stamp of New Zealand on them, I don’t quite know how. The way they turned in a slightly galumphing way, and glanced up sometimes, forthright, almost aggressive. After this desolate prologue, bebopping music began, and the models started dusting furniture while a host of fine feathers fell onto the stage.

  In the semi-darkness, I felt the client looking straight ahead at the models. He glanced at his watch.

  There were women dressed in red coats and tent-like jackets swinging down the catwalk, but once again an unmistakably Kiwi kind of swing, like meat on hooks at the freezing works. Clunk clunk clunk. I couldn’t take it seriously. I suppressed a giggle or two, and felt the client stiffen beside me. You know what it was (I decided)—it’s the smallness of our dinky little country, the intimacy. These women weren’t models, they were just girls from Glenn Innes, from Howick, dressed up. Therefore (I reasoned), you could never quite believe in the clothes they wore.

  I caught the eye of a machinist who was sitting diagonally in front of me. I waved, and commented to the client, ‘She works in the sweatshop. I mean workshop.’

  I felt his arm laugh and I inched away. But not before fibres from my wrap caught in his jacket as they rubbed up against each other. The tangle.

  It went as dark as a power cut, and some men in black could just be seen spinning out with a Thing on wheels, which was revealed to be a washing machine. Hypnotic music, and the models wobbled onto the catwalk wearing creepy hoods over dangling clothes, monk-like. They circled the washing machine as if they were worshipping it. I have to admit, this made the hackles rise. It was still absolute shite.

  I snuck a look at the client. It didn’t look as if his hackles had risen. His hand gripped mine, then dropped it again quickly. I snatched it away anyway. I glanced at my hand: burning. I thought at that moment that there was love involved, and falling, and actually used those words in my head, I had fallen in love, and it was a shame that I had. There had been no control over it, which was why they called it falling. You could plan all you liked, you could study and save and read self-improvement books and there would still be these words and this rush of ecstasy. The words came out of my mouth. I’d actually said these things. I fell in love. He twitched at the words, but looked straight ahead. Tears came into my eyes and I thought, I am going to cry and there is nothing I can do. And what does it matter? In the scheme of things. Are we meant to hide all this? Are the clothes more important? I wanted to stand up and announce to the room that I had loved this man, and now I knew about love. I wanted to laugh and cry and have everyone applaud.

  Why can’t we do this? Why can’t we?

  Then someone got up to talk about wells in Africa. The show was doing a fundraising thing and a very articulate woman who looked like Mabel’s sister but probably wasn’t, just had the same black glasses, spoke about how women and girls in Africa spent their lives carrying water. The girls couldn’t go to school because they were needed to carry water. How a single well in a village would change the lives of several hundred girls and women. People might have some inkling now, with the Blackout, of how hard life could be without basic facilities. People nodded.

  At intermission the rest of the audience rose in a body and spilled out the double doors and I could hear the clink of glasses outside. The client and I sat in our seats like statues. At one point I giggled and he gawuffed and I said, Oh, for goodness’ sake, and we went back to our statue routine. It was excruciating. I looked at his lovely hand, his sleeve.

  ‘I thought you were going.’

  ‘Well I may as well stay now seeing I’m driving you home.’

  •

  When the show resumed, there were people in trench coats and dark glasses sidling around corners. A KGB number, apparently, but seriously, the show could’ve been anything by this stage for all I cared—bullfighting, a man gored to bits, a Shakespearean play or a play by the artist formerly known as Shakespeare. I’d gone into a sort of reverie. For some reason I remembered Derrida in the Michael Fowler Centre, and the little dog from Kansas. How Derrida was that dog.

  I vaguely remember the aprons. I felt warmth coming from the client. I felt warmth passing into the client. I hated him. At that moment I remembered a sickening series of posters from my very early childhood—Love is . . . followed by a cutesy array of epithets. I thought: Love is Wanting the Other Person to be Happy. At that moment marriage, contentment, stability, stood back and took their hats off and watched Love walk by, recognising that they were humble and that this was greatness.

  As you can see, I was a goner.

  •

  We might have left the ballroom like zombies, but when we got out into the dusk and the client discovered his car had been towed, his zombie state vanished. He was instead a whirling dervish, all arms and legs and swear words. ‘Two hundred bloody dollars, the bastards.’ I stood and watched—I didn’t know him from Adam, you see. Other people watched too, in passing, including the double-breasted person and his draped wife. The client didn’t notice them. I did. I might have waved like the Queen. After a while the client’s tantrum subsided. By this time the crowd had thinned considerably. I caught sight of Mabel gathering her dinner troops around her, a lot of people in black-rimmed glasses. From a distance they looked like they were about to spray-paint a car. Then, there was nothing for it, the client had to talk to me even though we were In Public. I responded civilly even though I hated him. The client’s primary interest was in the costume. We discussed who would walk where, trips involving towing yards, his place, my place, and the fading light. Eventually I graciously agreed that we would both leg it to my place, I would change out of the costume, he would take delivery of said costume and get a taxi to the towing yard.

  On the way through the Parnell streets, past the ivy-covered Edwardian houses more English than the English, I power-walked ahead because I hated him, and he traipsed a few metres behind so as not to be associated with me. I must have looked like a sway-bummed Olympic walker.

  At the entrance to the Domain I stopped and felt him arrive beside me. He’d got over his Wouldn’t-Be-Seen-Dead thing, it seemed. There was no one else about. We stood looking into the shadowy arcade of trees, in which the birds were doing their crazy bedtime routine. You wouldn’t want to be stuck in the Domain after dark, but I decided riskily, deliciously (I felt it in my lungs), that there was just enough light to get through to the gates on the other side. I set off helter-skelter into the Domain with the client following. Past the beds of summer cannas which now, in March, were like oily rags. Past the Teletubby-like rise that led up to the museum. The odd car illuminated the trees madly. On I went, with the client slightly breathless behind me. I was fitter than him. I led him a Merry Dance. He caught up sometimes, sometimes he was behind.

  By the pond he said breathlessly, ‘That was crap, wasn’t it? I mean, the pretentious thing with the women ironing.’

  I bolted ahead and called back over my shoulder that I quite liked the women ironing.

  ‘And the pretentious thing with the Queen’s visit.’

  I’d quite liked that.

  ‘The pretentious thing with the Russians invading Czechoslovakia. I was thinking what if there were Russians in the audience.’

  I turned to face him and walked backwards for a minute. Looking back, yes, looking back. ‘What if there were any Czechs in the audience?’

  He was following, out of breath, loping like an ape. He’d devolved.

  ‘I was thinking,’ he wheezed, ‘what’s it to you? This is clothes, isn’t it? And this is New Zealand.’ He caught up. ‘Your aprons were good though.’

  ‘You wouldn’t notice an apron if it bit you on the bum.’

  ‘No, I did. They were good.’

  I turned back to face the path ahead. The pond caught the last reflection of the purple western sky, and went under the arthritic monkey-puzzles, and then the pohutukawa trees.

  ‘I don’t know why you’re doing this, though, this piecework.’

  Oh puh-lease, as they say in America. This again. The corporate capitalist. I remembered seeing him talking to the CEO, smiling, nodding, bowing, scraping, like a Pinnacle Power meter reader about to be given the push.

  We weren’t meant to be talking.

  I was off again, along the gnarly path. I caught sight of the fake Classical statuary down on the slope, a tooled Greek body twisting and glowing white in the dusk. That was the last landmark I could make out clearly—we were about two-thirds of the way through the Domain. The big trees, the big fat flax stands, the little lawns were beginning to blur into one deep greyness, but there was still enough light to see in front of us. The thing about these long twilights, though, is that you think they’re never going to end, but they do end. We seemed to decide simultaneously to quicken our pace along the path, and once or twice knocked against each other and jerked away. When we saw the trees break apart and the western sky outside the park show itself—it was really still quite light out there after all—we ran towards it.

  In case you thought we were going to get stuck in the Domain in the dark: we didn’t.

  I power-walked past the hospital, which had spread like a disease—building after building. He blundered after me. On the other side of the road the verandaed flower shops were all closed. I got to Grafton Bridge first. It was elegant in that light, or lack of it.

  •

  In the months following the Blackout, if I was out late at night on my own, I was aware that I now thought of the city differently, saw it differently, as if seeing right through it. I would look up dark alleys and think, I know you, I know darkness. It was dangerous, a crazy thing to do, to peer into empty buildings, but I wasn’t intimidated. They were like tents pitched in a frontier town. There was nothing to them. Nothing to it, this city. I’d seen it all undressed and there was nothing to it.

  I suppose this was the last of me going a bit wild. The client asked me, as I mended the costume, if I’d done that. I didn’t answer him. But it was true, I had enrolled in the middle-class finishing school. It was hard to plot exactly when it had begun. Perhaps it was when I became blasé about novels because I discovered you could take stories to bits. Continued on through getting married, dropping out (in that order), going to New York, falling in love. Perhaps it came to an end a few months after the Blackout, when things had settled down, I don’t know.

  When it was over I went very sensible.

  •

  The client wasn’t going to let me out of his sight until I handed over the costume. Let him come and get the bloody thing. When we got home I would skedaddle into the bedroom and unzip it. I would stand at the front door in my stockinged feet and shove it out at him. Take it!

  (You might think the costume is a McGuffin. It isn’t. I’m the McGuffin. We’re McGuffins. The costume is the deal.)

  As we traipsed across the bridge in single file, I starting thinking about the walk Art had had through the streets that first evening of the Blackout. His sense of wonder. I hoped that we—I—would be able to salvage something from all this that would be important, real, wonderful. The air above the bridge and all around was a beautiful mauve with the dusk. Everything was quiet apart from birds, sparrows chattering and the odd native, a bellbird, well, belling clearly above everything.

  ‘There is a certain wonder about this, don’t you think?’ I said over my shoulder.

  ‘No,’ said the client.

  I turned and saw he had that broody Mr Rochester look. I wasn’t Jane Eyre, I wasn’t Charlotte Brontë. I was blinking Jean Rhys. I was the nutty colonial.

  I finally led him down into the cemetery.

  36

  When we were about halfway across Grafton Bridge I spotted three or four street kids ahead of us. At least I thought they were street kids, from their Lord of the Rings-ish hoodie shapes, and their milling. I remembered that they’d occupied the street above the cemetery during the Blackout. Maybe they’d got accustomed to the extra space. Street kids on a deserted city street on a dark night: spiffing, fan-bloody-tastic. I crossed over to avoid them. The client followed and we trotted along like person and shadow. I was the person. Just as we came off the bridge, with Karangahape Road stretching ahead and getting dimmer in the dusk, I stopped. I could hear a strange sound that resembled a cat—Ouww! But it wasn’t a cat. I looked sideways and realised we were standing above another entrance to the cemetery, and that the cemetery stretched under the bridge. I’d never noticed this before. The sound came again—Ouuuuww! After a while I knew it was a boy. I squinted down the path that led into the cemetery.

  The client’s voice was hot and tight in my ear. ‘Keep. Going.’

  ‘Listen,’ I breathed.

  The mewling again.

  ‘Let’s go!’ said the client.

  We really needed to, and I turned. At that moment the owner of the voice, a tangle-haired boy, stepped out from behind bushes. He hesitated, looked back down the path that plunged into cemetery. ‘I fought it was you.’ It was the boy. Even in the half-light I could see he had a tender troubled face, and a jagged mark on the side of his temple. I think I gasped. He was alive.

  ‘GoGo!’ The client’s voice was ragged in my ear.

  I mumbled a query after the street kid’s health. I mean, my last proper sighting of him had been when his so-called friends were kicking him in the head on Queen Street. ‘Is . . . that alright?’ Indicating his noggin. Then we’d be off like a robber’s dog, my shadow and me.

  ‘F-fine,’ the boy said. He had a stutter and an urban accent. F-fahn. I got it. He was a sandwich short of a picnic, you could tell from his uncomprehending expression, the odd way he held his head. His eyes looked hard and grey like concrete, but with something underneath. I thought of the cemetery, the long-decayed bones. No, I didn’t, I think that now. Ah, the benefit of hindsight.

  The client was close to me. ‘You know him? What is this? Let’s go.’ His breath brushed my neck like a petal. Oh, he was a blinking rosebud. ‘GoGo, we’re going.’ I wasn’t scared. I’d been here all my life. He thought I came from some cushiony bloody background. I didn’t. The street kid tugged my sleeve. I looked down. His dirty hands. He just wanted more money. Couldn’t blame him.

  ‘He’s bullshitting you.’

  ‘Ain’t no b-bullshit,’ said the boy. He kept glancing back down the path. I could just make it out, a Jacobean pattern between the jutting graves and the little grey pockets of lawn. Stone angels arched their wings in the gloom. Everything was bathed in a pigeon-coloured light, and fine specks of pollen and insects filled the air. It was ethereal and somehow soothing. I felt torn, standing there, the client on one side, boy on the other. The client backed away onto the pavement. I could see the tense angle of his body. He was like a bloody heron. We were going. The boy stepped forward and took my hand. I snatched it away. It was rough and sticky, his hand.

  ‘S’alraht,’ he said. ‘Don’t want n-nuffeeng.’

  There was a giggle from the darkness below. I froze. The client called out urgently. GoGo! I made a lunge for the street, but a figure leaped out from behind the bushes and I felt a vice grip my arm. There was pain in my shoulders and sweat and yelling, and I was half carried, half frogmarched down through the scratching poking bushes into the cemetery. I thought my heart would stop. Behind me the client was following, going demented. It got darker and darker on the way down.

  I was deposited on a piece of grass. The client was beside me. I felt him grope for my arm. ‘Run!’ A burst of reggae, overblown and distorted, came from somewhere in the dark, a boom box followed by a shout. The client and I stumbled a couple of metres back in the direction we’d come from. Something whacked my shins, an agonising pain, and I heard the client groan, and we both tumbled. I lay, cupping my legs until the pain subsided. When I looked up, a new figure was barring our way. He was bigger than the slender boy, stocky and deeper-voiced.